Sun, November 14, 2010 7:00 pm at Alwan for the Arts

An event that spotlights practices specifically at the intersection of poetics, performance, and the moving image, P||R||J||C||T||N||S repositions the reading series as multi-genre platform, retracing its lineage to encompass the historical phenomenon of movie-telling as well as broader histories of performative practice.

Nodding in part at early 20th-century traditions of live film narration like those of Benshi in Japan and Gavrilov Translation in the USSR - often strategies for the ideological control of cinematic content - P||R||J||C||T||N||S emerges alongside recent nationwide recuperations of related practices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and beyond. The series expands movie-telling's mechanisms of destabilizing visual meaning in considering game-based genres like cartridge hacking and in-game intervention; post-production video editing tactics such as gag dubbing and re-subtitling; as well as electronic techniques of appropriation and misuse including data sculpting, browser poetry, and computational aesthetics.

A multidisciplinary ensemble of poets, filmmakers, musicians, performance artists, scholars, critics, and editors investigate the implementation of these strategies across the spectrum of their respective fields. P||R|||J|||C||T|||N||S presents a series of scenarios whose fundamental components are live narrators textually mediating between spectator and screen, marking the virally trending collective urge to intervene in regulated flows of data in media and information systems.

PRESENTERSAbigail Child is a media artist and writer whose original montage pushes the envelope of sound-image relations to make, in the words of LA Weekly, "brilliant exciting work...a vibrant political filmmaking that's attentive to form." Winner of the Rome Prize, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, both Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as participating in two Whitney Biennials, Child has had numerous retrospectives including the Buena Vista Center in San Francisco, Anthology Film Archive, Harvard Cinematheque, Reservoir, Switzerland and most recently at the Cinoteca in Rome. She is the author of THIS IS CALLED MOVING: A Critical Poetics of Film (2005) and Scatter Mix (1999), among others. She is currently completing two poetry manuscripts and editing a feature shot in Italy of the life of Percy and Mary Shelley, in the form of imaginary home movies. A book with interview and articles on her work, in both French and English, accompanied with DVD, will be appearing in early 2011 out of Metis Press, Geneva, Switzerland.

Sukhdev Sandhu is the author of London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined A City (2003), I'll Get My Coat (2005), and Night Haunts: A Journey Through The London Night (Verso Books, 2007), the latter subsequently developed as a series of site-specific performances and soundworks. He has also edited the essay collection Leaving the Factory: Wang Bing's 'West of the Tracks' (2009). He is the chief film critic of the Daily Telegraph and Director of the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Department at New York University.

Nada Gordon is the author of five poetry books: Folly, V. Imp, Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, and foriegnn bodie-- and an e-pistolary techno-romantic non-fiction novel, Swoon. Her new book, Scented Rushes, is just out from Roof books. A founding member of the Flarf Collective, she practices poetry, song, dance, dressmaking, and image manipulation as deep entertainment.